A self-confessed ‘data nerd’, Senior Data Scientist Louise joined the team seven months ago and is excited to have joined M&S at a time where Digital and Data have become a major priority for the business.

“Everybody’s really excited and keen to see the outputs and learn from each other. We can forge our own path and come up with something totally new.”

Passionate about Digital & Data

“Studying Algorithmic complexity at University taught me how to talk to computers and get them to do what I wanted and also figure out how long it would take them to do it. That’s probably where my interest in coding elements started.”

“My first job was then at IBM in their big data and analytics department as a consultant and that was a great way to learn a lot of the acronyms and technical jargon. I’ve been working on customer data projects at M&S since then.”

Louise finds her days super varied and wants to dispel the myth that a role in Data Science is purely computer based.

“I can be doing things like gathering requirements – and working out what does an output really need to do or show or how quickly does it need to run. But then I could be analysing a data set and maybe trying to figure out what our high value customers look like and what their properties are compared to our low value customers. There’s a lot of speaking to people as well as speaking to computers!”

A priority for the business

“I think that the challenges and opportunities, especially in my team are quite linked with everything being very new. The business is really excited for data science and so there’s loads of focus on it from high up in the business. One really good example is the Data Festival that we had a couple of months ago where we had an animated robot of our Chief Data and Digital officer, data themed cocktails, and more importantly a big data conference and a bunch of sharing sessions!”
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